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We found a drow who had been living in a cave where some terrifying dragon lived as well. Turns out the drow was the dragon when they transformed in mid-combat. My fighter did not see this, but was surely smart enough to figure that one out, right?

Not if I roll a natural 1 for intelligence apparantly. At least my fighter has no idea and won't try to cut down his potential love interest. Yay

It wasn't a 1, it was a 2, but it was the roll for my halfling to survive massive damage. It was the best death though, since he was doing some ninja flipping off a carriage, lodged some throwing knives in a demon's skull.. and got baseball-swing'd clean in half by one he couldn't see. Hit the ground in two pieces.

He got better. Sadly the RP group broke up before we could get much farther into the planned arc so we didn't get to build off it as much as I would have hoped, but that's the kind of dying I like my characters to do, even if they hadn't raised him.

Some years back, I ran a Hunter: The Vigil LARP. One of the characters was trying to use infernal powers to close a portal to Hell that had opened in a place. He decided to 'risk a Willpower,' a system in the game where you potentially increase the benefits of success at the risk of any failure being a 'dramatic failure,' the equivalent of botching or rolling a 1 in most systems.

He failed. A mild weak spot in the barrier between the material world and Hell became a full-blown Hellmouth and a variety of demons escaped. That led to another six or so months of plot cleaning up that particular mess.

We were using the critical hit and fumble cards in a pathfinder game one time. My monk charges in to a pack of dire rats, nat 1s the attack, confirms the miss, draws a fumble card. I got the result of "the attack hit everything adjacent to you except the original target". So I somehow fumbled my way into a roundhouse kick.

So the starwars edge of the empire ruleset has succes and good/bad thigns happens as seperate parts of a roll. In our fisrts session we had a shoot out in a cantina, our GM rolled a succes and all possible negative circumstabze for one NPc`S shot, end result: Our droid got hit in the chest,and the NPC`s blaster exploded, taking most of the bar with it.

One time, I went out of my way describing the various NPCs available for the party to question for information regarding various quest objectives, and on an impulse tossed in a mime that was being heckled.

The party immediately began to question the mime. So I answered the questions as best I could...in mime.

I once played a skilled rogue with a very high INT who chose to only speak in words with one syllable (or, as he would have put it, 'words with just one beat to them'). Nothing forced him to do so, he did it because he felt (a bit arrogantly) that if he used the full vocabulary available to someone with his intellect (mid 20s), the only person who might be able to understand him would be the party's wizard. Limiting his speech, he felt, made it easier for others to understand him, and also made him focus more on what he wanted to say. It was a pretty fun challenge.

This is beautiful. Especially because it's so annoying that most people apparently think there's such a strong positive correlation between intellect and median polysyllablism. Entirely unfoundedly, natch.

There is, however, a 'positive correlation' between people with intellectual interests, like vocabulary, and people who train their brain (intentionally or not) :P
As in, if you find languages fascinating and enjoy learning new words, you get more mental exercise than if you did everything else identically but never learned new words - and might have other hobbies that also train the brain.
And the brain is similar to a muscle; To keep it working in peak efficiency, you need to push its limits.

Plus, some words are only useful within specific contexts.
Contexts you are more likely to encounter if you do a lot of 'intellectual' things.

Ultimately, though, it's kind of like the whole 'smart people wear glasses' thing; If you work a lot with books and computers and rarely look beyond arm's reach, your eyes will be a lot more prone to degrading to where you need glasses.
But some dumb people are also just naturally born with bad eyes, and nowadays even people with no real talent for computers still use them for games (or reading webcomics)

I am quite skilled in sign language, as are a few of my fellow players. Unfortunately for my DM, he is not. As a result, we tend to make plans and discuss things both in and out of character (via purchasing appropriate languages or skills) in sign language, which leaves our poor DM confounded and often desiring an explanation of what just transpired. It's hilarious.

omg, I HAVE SOMETHING FOR THIS.
We had our Druid talk to moss. ^_^ So the GM draped himself backwards over a table and spoke like he was slightly British and also high and also mumbly. "Mmmmmmmmyes I suppose I couldmmmmmmmmmhelp you." It was hilarious, and for the next year we kept trying to talk to other plants, but no dice. ;) Until a month or so ago, and we had to talk to an earth elemental being held in a troll cave that was basically acting like their compost heap. We fed it tasty things (not just the scraps), and the GM made hilarious yummy noises. ^_^

I once played a jewish mystic who was unable to speak, didn't know sign language and he only knew German, Hebrew, Yiddish and Polish. All communication with anyone who didn't know those languages, he comunicated by cryptic whatever-the-practice-of-telling-signs-from-numbers-not-numerology-the-other-one-is-named communicates. I'd say it was fairly tricky for a form of communication.

So in one of my homebrew settings, there are living objects called artisan sprites. They could talk, but mostly weren't very animated. In the setting as a whole, most artisan sprites were jewelry, or works of art, there was a Royal Symphony of self-playing instruments, but I assumed that the players would be more inclined towards animated weapons.
Except one guy wanted a living ventriloquist dummy.
Well. After some consideration, I decided that the dummy had a wider range of movement than the average artisan sprite, but couldn't speak. I played him through body language, wild gestures of my arms, rocking my torso back and forth, and had extensive conversations with this player where I didn't speak a word. It was a ton of fun.

Once upon a time my Druid looked upon the beating heart of creation and was struck permanently mute as a result. Conceptually incapable of verbalization. Fortunately, he had a Hat of Disguise, so he communicated by crossing his arms and Disguising tattoos of what he wanted to say. Out of game, this was accomplished with the use of a whiteboard.

For one campaign, I created a character that had a disability similar to Hodor in that he can only say his name. He didn't repeat his name at all, every answer, comment, or cry for help was just a single utterance of his name. He otherwise communicated through body language that wasn't narrated unless it was very specific to the location, like "He points at X." He quickly became a player favorite to interact with because of how he was a puzzle unto himself.

Did a solo adventure in PF that involved going to a sneaky, stasi style prison. Inside it was magically enchanted to be perfectly silent. Everyone (PCs, enemies, NPCs) had to write on chalk boards if they wanted to communicate

I ran an Engineer in one campaign who was mute. (It definitely fit her backstory: a particularly traumatic accident involving her primitive interplanetary ark being Gambit Rouletted as a counter-missile, followed a hundred years of watching her species do some terrible stuff and avoiding them at all costs.) Being an engineer, she made herself a wacky automatic signboard. I don't think I ever thought of having her 'say' something radically different from what she meant to say, but I did figure she was almost incapable of using it to get peoples' attention. Also dead useless in combat.

Was that more or less unusual than in the next campaign, where you played two of the PCs who got linked into a hivemind? Sure, you "spoke" most of the time, but any sensory data or memory could be sent - including at one point a whole planetary population's worth of what everyone was seeing/hearing/feeling/thinking/doing at that moment.

I made a cat-person communicate by signals and notes, since he had no vocal cords. In retrospect, it was a poor idea, since he was a newbie and it restricted his actions too much. I was planning to have a god or something descend and give him the power of speech, but the campaign collapsed before I got the chance.

On my own account, I once played as a servo-skull in a 40K pbp game. I ran him as an enthusiastic puppy. "What's that, R4? Arch-lector Timius fell down a well?"

Not really an unusual form of communication, per se, but the last campaign I ran, the players attained a form of magical skype that let them communicate with the twin deities of the world I'd created. They expected it to work flawlessly so that the sorceress could talk to her boyfriend (the male twin. Long story. Kind of.) with ease to get help when she needed it. Well.... It was magical skype. I told them that upfront. They were surprised when calls kept cutting out.

I'm currently in a campaign where I play a sorcerer who's an N dimensional creature who got stuffed into a 3 dimensional suit so he could come to the current game world to avenge the death of a friend. His native language sounds like backwards talking, so I've learned how to pronounce certain words backwards.

I think the best bet would probably be to go for a 'smart computer with a limited interface' angle, if you're ever in the GM's position.
Exactly how smart depends on how smart the bees should be, obviously.
But, essentially, you could have the bees be smart in how they treat any info they do get, but make them limited in what they can understand or express; The 'in/out' of information is limited by the individual bees, but inside the swarm information can be processed in bits and pieces as signals are passed around.
So there wouldn't really be a proper language, I suppose.

I once was in a game where we were an international task force tracking down a murderer. I believe I've mentioned it here before. None of our characters had a language shared with more than one other member of the party, leading to a game of telephone every time we needed to convey ANYTHING. In practice, our GM handwaved this because we all had at least one language in common with one person, and were smart enough to split into groups that shared a language when we did split. But the initial meeting was still funny.

More recently, I just started GMing a game of Genius: The Transgression where the PCs are the time police, tasked with maintaining the "correct" line of events in the 1910's. Their first mission took them to Russia, and none of them had Russian as a language. So they were taking massive penalties to communicate with basically every NPC because they were talking through a phrasebook. They had borrowed a translator device from another member of their organization, but it's fault was that it wouldn't necessarily translate anything into English. So the sentences would come out something like "Hello, yo voy a la bibliotecheu wen es angeht." (Sorry for lack of accents where appropriate, didn't feel like going and learning how to make them.) On the upside for that mission, it allowed me to do my hilariously awful Russian accent for a session and a half. That's always fun.

I have played a mute Medtech who talked in sign language to his younger sister, the demo, to converse. Which let to a funny bit where a party member called my cellphone...and I just remained silent...
Also insert many jokes from my group about getting the most talkative player to play a mute.

I have also played a deaf character (who read lips and eventually had telepathy), a character who could not speak Common (and the only PC that could translate was a jerk who constantly mistranslated on purpose), and...I think that is it as far as methods of conversing. I usually try to speak Common at least.

Our party had captured a goblin, one of a group that had been trying to kill us. The rest had escaped, and we knew they'd probably be back, so we took the time while we had it to interrogate the captive.

...Except that none of us spoke goblin and he didn't speak common, nor did we share any written languages. So all we had to work with while questioning the guy was our crude interpretations of his crude drawings.

Cue two hours of frustrated sketching and pointing by players and DM alike.

I recently portrayed a minor god that communicated solely in telepathic, mind-melting emotion-laden visual imagery. Sadly, the players didn't really seem to want to engage, or maybe the metaphors were just lost on them.